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He’d been grateful, always, relentlessly, exhaustingly grateful. He thanked me for planning this, thanked me for handling that, thanked me for being so good at every last part of it. For six years I read gratitude as love when it was closer to relief. He needed me to run the household so he didn’t have to. I carried his dry cleaning and his calendar and his friendships and his moods, and I did it so automatically, for so long, I stopped seeing that no one was doing any of it for me. I could have kept it up another decade and not one person would have caught it, me included.
There was a Saturday afternoon months before the end. David was at his parents’. I was alone in our apartment with a glass of Malbec and a romance novel I’d bought on a whim because the cover pulled me in, and the apartment was as quiet as it only got when David was out. The TV was off. A car passed below the window and then nothing followed it for a long while. I was on the couch with my feet tucked under me and the light coming in low and warm on the side of my face, the Malbec dry and a little sharp along the sides of my tongue, a hundred pages in, when I hit the scene.
The hero told the heroine what he wanted, plainly, with no qualifiers. He didn’t ask her for any of it and he didn’t hint. He’d made the decision before he opened his mouth, and he gave her the information as a courtesy, because he wanted her to know what was coming. It was fucking hot.
I had to put the book face down on my own knee, in an empty apartment, in the middle of the afternoon, and stare at a wall until my brain caught up. My thighs pressed together. Heat worked up my neck and into my face and was still there when I quit staring at the paint. I had a glass of wine in one hand and a paperback on my knee and I was blushing at a wall, alone, a grown woman with a pension plan.
I sat there with the wine turning warm in my hand and tried to remember the last time anybody had wanted me that directly, as if I were the point of the evening instead of a useful part of it, or the expected end of it. The answer that came back wasn’t flattering. Then I finished the book in one sitting.
The marriage conversation came not long after that. Once he’d said the word wedding out loud, I sat there thinking over what it would mean. Every decision would land on me, every vendor, every family dynamic to smooth over, every detail he’d turn to me to fix with the warm, grateful helplessness I’d once found endearing. I built the wedding in my head and it came out as a second job with a party at the end. Past the wedding sat the kids, the house, twenty more years of being the one keeping it all together while he was grateful about it. I would be carrying all of it for the rest of my life.
I sat on it for most of a season before I said a word. I was waiting to find out whether I was wrong.
“I don’t think I want this,” I said, on a Tuesday, in the kitchen, with my hands still wet from doing the dishes.
I drove to Phoenix in July and hadn’t wanted a single day of Boston back since.
Phoenix was supposed to be the exhale, with a new city, a new job, and a new version of Delaney Rhodes who didn’t organize her life around the gaps other people left. Instead I was back on my banking app, because apparently I was committed to the bit.
The phone buzzed in my hand. It wasn’t the banking app this time.
Maren: Okay so I have a thing to ask and I need you to actually hear me out
Maren: Eli Kovac. Sidewinders defenseman. He’s a single dad and he needs a full-time nanny. His daughter is four. Her name is Iris.
Maren: She is the best child I have ever met and I work with professional athletes so my bar for people who think they’re the center of the universe is very high
Maren: The position comes with a casita. Own door, own bathroom. Good pay. I mean really good, Delaney
Maren: You were a kindergarten teacher for fourteen years. You’re extraordinary with kids. You need income.
Maren: This is the thing.
Maren: Delaney
Maren: I can see you reading these
I read them through, then again. Then I got up, crossed to the kitchen, poured what was left of the bottle into a glass, and carried it back to the couch. The kitchen tile was cold under my bare feet, and I hurried both directions. The wine was a little past its prime. This wasn’t a good-wine occasion. This was a drink-it-standing-over-the-sink pour I was dignifying with a couch.
Me: I have never been a nanny. I have been a kindergarten teacher, which is the same job with twenty-two of them and a laminator.
Maren: Same skill set. Better hours.
Maren: Also you’re running out of money and you love kids. Both of those things are true right now.
Me: One of those is a lovely thing to say about a person and the other one is a felony.
Maren: Delaney.
Me: Tell me about him. All of it, I want the file, I want to know what he is like.
Maren: Look him up. Then call me.
My phone sat in my hand, the banking app still open behind the messages, the number unchanged. It sat on one side of my thumb and Maren’s texts sat on the other. Then I typed the one word that would make all of this Maren’s fault.
Me: Fine.
Eli Kovac.
